Chapter Notes: Blood Price
Jan. 28th, 2021 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokiofsassgaardBlood Price, or Loki's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I think this is also the first chapter since the first one where everything I wanted to do with it fit.
There is so much going on in this chapter, and a lot of it ties up old threads from Those Who Hunt Monsters. I really was not joking when I said I'd meant for that one to be a quick intro, and then it turned into 70,000 words of exposition.
While almost this entire chapter was planned from the beginning, it's played out very differently than I'd penned it to when I started the series. For one, I hadn't really anticipated everything happening at once. Loki goes through a lot in this chapter, and originally I'd meant to devote a little bit more time to all of it individually, but piling everything on him at once wound up being a better driving force for the meat of this story. The introduction of Gram also tidies up a plot point that I wasn't terribly sure about when I first conceived of this idea. That was a nice little gift from Agent of Asgard that works a lot better to get Loki out of Asgard than another argument does. The fact that Agent of Asgard even set up a youthful Odin being harassed by Loki played perfectly into where this story was going, with there being two Lokis in the family tree, so to speak.
Because that was an idea I set up around about Young Avengers. There were always multiple Lokis ever since Ragnarok, but they always existed more or less on a linear timeline. Loki was a head on Thor's belt, and then he was Sif, and then he was a man, and then he was a little boy, and then and then and then. There was the whole thing with Ikol, in which Loki is canonically terrible at names, but even then Ikol didn't truly become Loki until the end of his run in Journey into Mystery. It was hinted at and played with, but he was still trapped in this weak and fragile vessel. Even after Loki ate him, Kid Loki ceased to be, and Ikol took his body. It wasn't until Agent of Asgard that there were two physical Lokis, capable of being in the same room. (Unless you count those gross Doom clones. Which I do not.)
I do not know if I will ever go the route of them still being the same Loki, just with weird time shenanigans though. I think I like that the cyclical nature of the gods can be played out simply by different, unique iterations of each of them. Thor was probably named for someone else as well. Odin is old enough to be the same man from the myths, so he may be one of the few gods still living that were actually worshipped on Midgard. I also really like the idea of Allfather being nothing more than a title. Odin is not literally everyone's father. But as king, he takes on the role of father to the entire realm. Should a woman ascend to the throne, she would be the Allmother.
As such, I am kind of disregarding a lot of the Marvel family tree with this, because I kinda don't like the idea of Týr and Thor being brothers, if it also means that Týr is Sif's father. Yeah, nope. I'm sure plenty of cousin and niece-fucking happens in Asgard, but this isn't the story in which I want to explore that. Instead, what I found more interesting to explore are other ways in which Marvel is not Norse lore. I really wanted to play up the idea that she was more or less betrothed to Thor, making the ship a foregone conclusion. But she and Thor aren't really an item in the comics aside from some early Silver Age stuff, and frankly my heart beats for Sif/Bill. Sif and Thor were never a good match. It was expected, because of her father's role in Odin's army. There were probably some shady, back door politics behind the arrangement, but I don't think anything was ever truly official. Which is why Thor is now in his early 20s, soon to be crowned king, and still unwed. Sif liked him as a teen, because he was the crown prince, and this big, brave brute she could ride off and slay trolls with. But as a man, he's kind of an ass. And I think Sif is the most recent person to have noticed this.
I'd been trying to find a good way to put her and Loki on the same side for a while, and Theoric's poisoning wound up being perfect. I rewrote the next-morning scene about three or four times, and none of them looked the same as what came before. The first few were scrapped because Thor kept stepping too far over the line from kind of an ass, to full-blown, raging tyrant. It turns out pre-banishment Thor is a really tricky tightrope to write. Pre-banishment Thor has so much compassion, it clouds his judgement and causes him to seek revenge for any slight against someone or something he loves. His problem isn't a lack of compassion; it's too much. And every time he was present in the room when Loki finds out Theoric has been poisoned, Thor took over the entire scene, all anger and rage and "HOW DARE!?"
Taking Thor out, and making that scene just about Loki and Sif wound up being exactly what it needed. Sif knows Loki is a scheming, lying scoundrel, and if anyone can slither out of straight up murder accusations, it's him. And I think Loki was right. I think Sif knows that just by dint of being there, she was culpable. Perhaps even more than Loki, as everyone else would attest to having seen him pass out early, while she was part of the group who were the last to see Theoric alive. I don't think she realised she may have been the one to have personally given him the wine until Loki pointed it out, though.
In one of the last chapters of TWHM, Sif straight up says that Jötunn mead is toxic. Early in this chapter, Loki reiterates to those who were already in the room not to take anything from Jötunheimr. It is absolutely common knowledge that something about Jötunn booze is deadly to the Æsir, while Æsir booze does about as much for Loki as half a Mike's Hard Lemonade. After all, Loki has been outdrinking Thor since they were six.
Killing off Theoric was another thing I'd planned back when I had thought that the endgame ship might be Loki/Sigyn. And part of Loki's dialogue still kind of teases at that. These first few chapters have also been doing a lot to sort of hint at the more grown-up aspects of Asgardian culture. Týr's theft, blood prices, forced marriage to widows, impending war. Loki still acts like an absolute child at times, but he's a grown man at this point (probably), and understands that there are more consequences to breaking the rules than just having his ear pulled by his mother.
I also think at this point, Loki is a known deviant in other ways. Sif catches on pretty quickly to the sundry reasons Loki might own, and openly pretend to steal a pretty gown. I imagine he has also been caught in bed with other men more than a few times, and only continues to get away with it because of who he is. And from that reason, Sif realised why Loki does not appear to give a single flying fuck about rumours or gossip concerning him. Because anything the court can say, he has surely done worse. She personally bullied him in their youth, and had a hand in shaping a man who refuses to live by Asgardian rules, because as she was so fond of repeatedly point out, he is not Asgardian. And therefore the rules don't apply. If it takes a lesser act of degeneracy to cast doubt on a much larger crime, Loki will not hesitate for a second to put himself out there.
By this point, I wanted to do one other thing, but there just wasn't any good place to put it. In a lot of ways, this scene between Loki and Sif fills the same role. I wanted to have a scene where Loki, as a woman, had some guy in bed with him and a big loud scary thing happened that interrupted the activities and pulled him out to the corridor, tits out for all to see. I think this way, with the gown and subtle implications was a better way of doing it though. This way, the idea is planted that Sif has heard rumours, which is why she does not need to be told directly. She needed to be prompted, but she still gets the idea after a very brief exchange.
Sif is also smart enough to know how to take his lead. He put himself into a position to be thrown under the bus for the sake of her alibi, and she took it. Gossip would spread quickly that Loki has been caught stealing gowns from womens' wardrobes now, and Sif is immediately seen wearing the one she "reclaimed." Where Loki actually got it, who the hell knows. But it's Sif's now, apparently. He gave her everything she needed to distance herself while all the heat gets deflected to him, and he asked nothing in return. At the same time, it does insulate Loki as well, because he changed the context of her visit by changing the narrative. As the god of stories, this is what he's best at. Now it no longer looks like she had come to talk about murder most foul. She came to shout about Loki being a pervert and a thief. When Loki gave her that avenue, she gratefully took it and cemented it without needing to be told how. Their history is well known, so nobody will question her barging into his room to shout the roof off at him over something dodgy.
At the same time, he still terrifies her. When Loki sees himself in the mirror, he sees himself through his own judgement. He sees someone who is too short and too scrawny to be the thing he is supposed to be, while not being anything like the thing he wants to be. Sif still sees the monster from the bedtime stories she was told as a child. Even when he is pretending to be Asgardian, he is bigger, heavier, and stronger than her in every way. He may be a pocket-sized frost giant, but he is still a frost giant who could easily overpower her in more ways than one. That the thought to do so has never crossed Loki's mind, has itself never crossed Sif's mind. She's never seen him fight, but she hasn't had to. She saw a skinny 16 year old boy kill a hippogryph, and listened to him talk about being in battle, and has heard tale of his personal beef with Vanaheimr's king. He practises powerful dark magics, and can change his shape into anything he wants (probably). That is a lot of fear to get over in just a few short months.
While Sif stated a desire start over between them, there is a lot of work to be done from both sides for this to happen. And while Loki is definitely capable of holding grudges, he's also capable of letting go. It's Post-Siege Loki that a lot of his influence is drawn from. Not a Loki who is driven to madness over centuries of slights, but one who just wants a damn friend. His cautious interactions with Fandral are there to show that he is willing to try, though he'll always be a little afraid of getting hurt again. He could have kicked everyone out, or just spent the whole night with Hogun off in some quiet corner, but he chose to allow this nonsense to happen, and to involve himself in it. Because Thor is also right. He's lonely, and he hasn't been doing the things he enjoys since returning from Midgard.
And that's another thing I've been really playing with since the very beginning. These shifting alliances within the group. Loki found friends that he liked. They were his friends, and he didn't have to share them with anyone. And then somehow, Thor still stole them away. Even before Loki stopped talking to Fandral, he and Thor had started hanging out a bit more. As Loki distanced himself more, Hogun just followed onto Fandral, because Hogun doesn't have many friends either. And I don't think Thor ever noticed that he'd sort of stolen Loki's friends. Because how do you steal someone's friend at all? Are they not their own person, capable of making their own choices?
I would like to see this start to swing around the other way. Thor has completely blown it with Sif, and now Loki holds a secret that could ruin her. I want to use this as a way to force them to get closer to one another. It's a tricky situation, because Loki holds all the power in this relationship right now. But he's also got a very good track record with her, despite appearances. Yes, he did technically curse her, but since that moment he has also kept to their agreement to ignore one another's existence. Which he still more or less does. He is also the only reason she is not wed to Thrymr right now. And not only did Loki manage to get Sif out of that arrangement, he did so without dooming some other innocent girl as Thor almost surely would have done. And now this. It should become clear fairly quickly that Loki has no intention at all to use this secret against her. If he wanted her gone, she would not be around now. The only thing Sif can truly hold against Loki is what happened between him and Týr. And even then, it's probably kind of hard to spin "stealing the prince's dog and chaining it to a post" in any way that puts Týr in a good light. That's a sticking point, but also one that is better forgotten than trying to go through the mental gymnastics to twist it without just making all three of them look bad in the process.
And I think that also at the end of the day, Loki's still kind of afraid of her. He mostly knows her as tiny anger and flying fists, and not as someone who is capable of anything even remotely friendly. At the same time, part of me kind of wants to find a way to put these two in bed together. If for no other reason than Thor would go nuclear over it, and there's some good conflict to be farmed from it.
Another thing during the party itself was a good opportunity to reiterate that Loki had been a bit bamboozled by the rite. Thor and Fandral both instantly cop to just phoning theirs in, and don't even really try to hide it. Now, Loki has realised that he effectively scammed himself out of a year-long vacation, as long as he had just done it with some vague-ass goal in mind. Fandral 100% spent his year whoring around the realms, occasionally talking about trying to find some mystery box nobody's ever actally seen. And now Loki realises he could have done the same, claimed he was off studying ancient ways or something, and nobody would care? Fucking rude. Especially since he wound up getting shot and stabbed and blown up as a result of this stubborn avoidance.
At the same time, he instantly became the most badass motherfucker in that entire room, and that's kind of nice. He'll probably never get used to that feeling as long as he lives.
Another thing I really like playing with is that Odin frequently terrifies Loki. When they're on the same side, like when they both ganged on up Iri, Loki can easily put that aside. Odin has never been awful to Loki, but he's angry with him often enough that it's slowly become Loki's entire image of his father. When Thor jokes about Odin's vexation with Loki's new rooms, Loki's response is basically "what else is new?" For years, Loki has not done a single thing that has not irritated or annoyed his father. Loki knows he's a disappointment, and he hides behind his excuse of not being Æsir to avoid the worst sting. In reality, I don't think Odin is disappointed with him at all. In a lot of ways, Loki has far exceeded anything Odin would have expected for him. Between Loki and Thor, he's the better negotiator. He actually takes an interest in politics, and while he takes an eternity to do what he's told, when he finally does get to it he throws everything he's got into accomplishing it. He was kept with the primary purpose of training to be a sorcerer, and he's already dangerously powerful. It's just that raising a child who is visibly from a foreign culture and expecting him to just cast all of that out was always going to cause problems. Now, here he is as a young man with no idea who or what he is. He has nowhere he feels like he belongs, so he misbehaves and runs away to other realms, and is kindasortaaccidentally the reason for two looming wars. He's not a disappointment, but he is way more difficult to handle than Odin had ever expected. His purpose was to be a sorcerer and secret keeper, hidden in the shadows and acting almost as a power behind the throne. And here he is instead, the constant centre of attention and controversy, to the point that every single thing he does is examined under an electron microscope. There is no way in hell Loki will be able to take on any kind of role in which he is required to act in any kind of secrecy.
And making matters worse, his body keeps finding new and exciting ways of betraying him. He's stayed really shrimpy, his skin is too dark, he isn't shaped right, he doesn't heal right, he's growing hair where he shouldn't. And now, years later than he should, he's got horns growing out of his skull. Eir, Frigga, and Odin all expected this when he was much younger, and Frigga even used the fact that Loki's horns had not cut to keep him from being forced to take his rite. Even several years before that, Eir asked him about headaches, and told him to see her immediately if he started getting them. This instruction was given so long ago, Loki forgot he had ever received it. And if it wasn't bad enough that people think he's an impostor, now he's got horns. Great. Fantastic. Just what he wanted.
A long time ago, I read a story about frost giants having horns, but being disbudded at a young age because they were hunted by the Æsir for their horns. And I remember thinking, wow. That's hilariously fucked up and cruel. And I kinda wanted more of that. I like the idea of frost giants having horns, because fire giants are always drawn with them, and I like the symmetry. I'm pretty sure there have been a few runs or one-shots where frost giants had horns(?), and those gross Doom clones all had horns, so that's the direction I wanted to go with Loki. Fire giants having horns is also the aspect that made me want to incorporate Hellboy in the first place. Like I said before, I think we all know what's going on with Surtur there. I don't think Loki has the mental fortitude to piece that together, but he'll get there eventually. By force, if need be.
There is so much going on in this chapter, and a lot of it ties up old threads from Those Who Hunt Monsters. I really was not joking when I said I'd meant for that one to be a quick intro, and then it turned into 70,000 words of exposition.
While almost this entire chapter was planned from the beginning, it's played out very differently than I'd penned it to when I started the series. For one, I hadn't really anticipated everything happening at once. Loki goes through a lot in this chapter, and originally I'd meant to devote a little bit more time to all of it individually, but piling everything on him at once wound up being a better driving force for the meat of this story. The introduction of Gram also tidies up a plot point that I wasn't terribly sure about when I first conceived of this idea. That was a nice little gift from Agent of Asgard that works a lot better to get Loki out of Asgard than another argument does. The fact that Agent of Asgard even set up a youthful Odin being harassed by Loki played perfectly into where this story was going, with there being two Lokis in the family tree, so to speak.
Because that was an idea I set up around about Young Avengers. There were always multiple Lokis ever since Ragnarok, but they always existed more or less on a linear timeline. Loki was a head on Thor's belt, and then he was Sif, and then he was a man, and then he was a little boy, and then and then and then. There was the whole thing with Ikol, in which Loki is canonically terrible at names, but even then Ikol didn't truly become Loki until the end of his run in Journey into Mystery. It was hinted at and played with, but he was still trapped in this weak and fragile vessel. Even after Loki ate him, Kid Loki ceased to be, and Ikol took his body. It wasn't until Agent of Asgard that there were two physical Lokis, capable of being in the same room. (Unless you count those gross Doom clones. Which I do not.)
I do not know if I will ever go the route of them still being the same Loki, just with weird time shenanigans though. I think I like that the cyclical nature of the gods can be played out simply by different, unique iterations of each of them. Thor was probably named for someone else as well. Odin is old enough to be the same man from the myths, so he may be one of the few gods still living that were actually worshipped on Midgard. I also really like the idea of Allfather being nothing more than a title. Odin is not literally everyone's father. But as king, he takes on the role of father to the entire realm. Should a woman ascend to the throne, she would be the Allmother.
As such, I am kind of disregarding a lot of the Marvel family tree with this, because I kinda don't like the idea of Týr and Thor being brothers, if it also means that Týr is Sif's father. Yeah, nope. I'm sure plenty of cousin and niece-fucking happens in Asgard, but this isn't the story in which I want to explore that. Instead, what I found more interesting to explore are other ways in which Marvel is not Norse lore. I really wanted to play up the idea that she was more or less betrothed to Thor, making the ship a foregone conclusion. But she and Thor aren't really an item in the comics aside from some early Silver Age stuff, and frankly my heart beats for Sif/Bill. Sif and Thor were never a good match. It was expected, because of her father's role in Odin's army. There were probably some shady, back door politics behind the arrangement, but I don't think anything was ever truly official. Which is why Thor is now in his early 20s, soon to be crowned king, and still unwed. Sif liked him as a teen, because he was the crown prince, and this big, brave brute she could ride off and slay trolls with. But as a man, he's kind of an ass. And I think Sif is the most recent person to have noticed this.
I'd been trying to find a good way to put her and Loki on the same side for a while, and Theoric's poisoning wound up being perfect. I rewrote the next-morning scene about three or four times, and none of them looked the same as what came before. The first few were scrapped because Thor kept stepping too far over the line from kind of an ass, to full-blown, raging tyrant. It turns out pre-banishment Thor is a really tricky tightrope to write. Pre-banishment Thor has so much compassion, it clouds his judgement and causes him to seek revenge for any slight against someone or something he loves. His problem isn't a lack of compassion; it's too much. And every time he was present in the room when Loki finds out Theoric has been poisoned, Thor took over the entire scene, all anger and rage and "HOW DARE!?"
Taking Thor out, and making that scene just about Loki and Sif wound up being exactly what it needed. Sif knows Loki is a scheming, lying scoundrel, and if anyone can slither out of straight up murder accusations, it's him. And I think Loki was right. I think Sif knows that just by dint of being there, she was culpable. Perhaps even more than Loki, as everyone else would attest to having seen him pass out early, while she was part of the group who were the last to see Theoric alive. I don't think she realised she may have been the one to have personally given him the wine until Loki pointed it out, though.
In one of the last chapters of TWHM, Sif straight up says that Jötunn mead is toxic. Early in this chapter, Loki reiterates to those who were already in the room not to take anything from Jötunheimr. It is absolutely common knowledge that something about Jötunn booze is deadly to the Æsir, while Æsir booze does about as much for Loki as half a Mike's Hard Lemonade. After all, Loki has been outdrinking Thor since they were six.
Killing off Theoric was another thing I'd planned back when I had thought that the endgame ship might be Loki/Sigyn. And part of Loki's dialogue still kind of teases at that. These first few chapters have also been doing a lot to sort of hint at the more grown-up aspects of Asgardian culture. Týr's theft, blood prices, forced marriage to widows, impending war. Loki still acts like an absolute child at times, but he's a grown man at this point (probably), and understands that there are more consequences to breaking the rules than just having his ear pulled by his mother.
I also think at this point, Loki is a known deviant in other ways. Sif catches on pretty quickly to the sundry reasons Loki might own, and openly pretend to steal a pretty gown. I imagine he has also been caught in bed with other men more than a few times, and only continues to get away with it because of who he is. And from that reason, Sif realised why Loki does not appear to give a single flying fuck about rumours or gossip concerning him. Because anything the court can say, he has surely done worse. She personally bullied him in their youth, and had a hand in shaping a man who refuses to live by Asgardian rules, because as she was so fond of repeatedly point out, he is not Asgardian. And therefore the rules don't apply. If it takes a lesser act of degeneracy to cast doubt on a much larger crime, Loki will not hesitate for a second to put himself out there.
By this point, I wanted to do one other thing, but there just wasn't any good place to put it. In a lot of ways, this scene between Loki and Sif fills the same role. I wanted to have a scene where Loki, as a woman, had some guy in bed with him and a big loud scary thing happened that interrupted the activities and pulled him out to the corridor, tits out for all to see. I think this way, with the gown and subtle implications was a better way of doing it though. This way, the idea is planted that Sif has heard rumours, which is why she does not need to be told directly. She needed to be prompted, but she still gets the idea after a very brief exchange.
Sif is also smart enough to know how to take his lead. He put himself into a position to be thrown under the bus for the sake of her alibi, and she took it. Gossip would spread quickly that Loki has been caught stealing gowns from womens' wardrobes now, and Sif is immediately seen wearing the one she "reclaimed." Where Loki actually got it, who the hell knows. But it's Sif's now, apparently. He gave her everything she needed to distance herself while all the heat gets deflected to him, and he asked nothing in return. At the same time, it does insulate Loki as well, because he changed the context of her visit by changing the narrative. As the god of stories, this is what he's best at. Now it no longer looks like she had come to talk about murder most foul. She came to shout about Loki being a pervert and a thief. When Loki gave her that avenue, she gratefully took it and cemented it without needing to be told how. Their history is well known, so nobody will question her barging into his room to shout the roof off at him over something dodgy.
At the same time, he still terrifies her. When Loki sees himself in the mirror, he sees himself through his own judgement. He sees someone who is too short and too scrawny to be the thing he is supposed to be, while not being anything like the thing he wants to be. Sif still sees the monster from the bedtime stories she was told as a child. Even when he is pretending to be Asgardian, he is bigger, heavier, and stronger than her in every way. He may be a pocket-sized frost giant, but he is still a frost giant who could easily overpower her in more ways than one. That the thought to do so has never crossed Loki's mind, has itself never crossed Sif's mind. She's never seen him fight, but she hasn't had to. She saw a skinny 16 year old boy kill a hippogryph, and listened to him talk about being in battle, and has heard tale of his personal beef with Vanaheimr's king. He practises powerful dark magics, and can change his shape into anything he wants (probably). That is a lot of fear to get over in just a few short months.
While Sif stated a desire start over between them, there is a lot of work to be done from both sides for this to happen. And while Loki is definitely capable of holding grudges, he's also capable of letting go. It's Post-Siege Loki that a lot of his influence is drawn from. Not a Loki who is driven to madness over centuries of slights, but one who just wants a damn friend. His cautious interactions with Fandral are there to show that he is willing to try, though he'll always be a little afraid of getting hurt again. He could have kicked everyone out, or just spent the whole night with Hogun off in some quiet corner, but he chose to allow this nonsense to happen, and to involve himself in it. Because Thor is also right. He's lonely, and he hasn't been doing the things he enjoys since returning from Midgard.
And that's another thing I've been really playing with since the very beginning. These shifting alliances within the group. Loki found friends that he liked. They were his friends, and he didn't have to share them with anyone. And then somehow, Thor still stole them away. Even before Loki stopped talking to Fandral, he and Thor had started hanging out a bit more. As Loki distanced himself more, Hogun just followed onto Fandral, because Hogun doesn't have many friends either. And I don't think Thor ever noticed that he'd sort of stolen Loki's friends. Because how do you steal someone's friend at all? Are they not their own person, capable of making their own choices?
I would like to see this start to swing around the other way. Thor has completely blown it with Sif, and now Loki holds a secret that could ruin her. I want to use this as a way to force them to get closer to one another. It's a tricky situation, because Loki holds all the power in this relationship right now. But he's also got a very good track record with her, despite appearances. Yes, he did technically curse her, but since that moment he has also kept to their agreement to ignore one another's existence. Which he still more or less does. He is also the only reason she is not wed to Thrymr right now. And not only did Loki manage to get Sif out of that arrangement, he did so without dooming some other innocent girl as Thor almost surely would have done. And now this. It should become clear fairly quickly that Loki has no intention at all to use this secret against her. If he wanted her gone, she would not be around now. The only thing Sif can truly hold against Loki is what happened between him and Týr. And even then, it's probably kind of hard to spin "stealing the prince's dog and chaining it to a post" in any way that puts Týr in a good light. That's a sticking point, but also one that is better forgotten than trying to go through the mental gymnastics to twist it without just making all three of them look bad in the process.
And I think that also at the end of the day, Loki's still kind of afraid of her. He mostly knows her as tiny anger and flying fists, and not as someone who is capable of anything even remotely friendly. At the same time, part of me kind of wants to find a way to put these two in bed together. If for no other reason than Thor would go nuclear over it, and there's some good conflict to be farmed from it.
Another thing during the party itself was a good opportunity to reiterate that Loki had been a bit bamboozled by the rite. Thor and Fandral both instantly cop to just phoning theirs in, and don't even really try to hide it. Now, Loki has realised that he effectively scammed himself out of a year-long vacation, as long as he had just done it with some vague-ass goal in mind. Fandral 100% spent his year whoring around the realms, occasionally talking about trying to find some mystery box nobody's ever actally seen. And now Loki realises he could have done the same, claimed he was off studying ancient ways or something, and nobody would care? Fucking rude. Especially since he wound up getting shot and stabbed and blown up as a result of this stubborn avoidance.
At the same time, he instantly became the most badass motherfucker in that entire room, and that's kind of nice. He'll probably never get used to that feeling as long as he lives.
Another thing I really like playing with is that Odin frequently terrifies Loki. When they're on the same side, like when they both ganged on up Iri, Loki can easily put that aside. Odin has never been awful to Loki, but he's angry with him often enough that it's slowly become Loki's entire image of his father. When Thor jokes about Odin's vexation with Loki's new rooms, Loki's response is basically "what else is new?" For years, Loki has not done a single thing that has not irritated or annoyed his father. Loki knows he's a disappointment, and he hides behind his excuse of not being Æsir to avoid the worst sting. In reality, I don't think Odin is disappointed with him at all. In a lot of ways, Loki has far exceeded anything Odin would have expected for him. Between Loki and Thor, he's the better negotiator. He actually takes an interest in politics, and while he takes an eternity to do what he's told, when he finally does get to it he throws everything he's got into accomplishing it. He was kept with the primary purpose of training to be a sorcerer, and he's already dangerously powerful. It's just that raising a child who is visibly from a foreign culture and expecting him to just cast all of that out was always going to cause problems. Now, here he is as a young man with no idea who or what he is. He has nowhere he feels like he belongs, so he misbehaves and runs away to other realms, and is kindasortaaccidentally the reason for two looming wars. He's not a disappointment, but he is way more difficult to handle than Odin had ever expected. His purpose was to be a sorcerer and secret keeper, hidden in the shadows and acting almost as a power behind the throne. And here he is instead, the constant centre of attention and controversy, to the point that every single thing he does is examined under an electron microscope. There is no way in hell Loki will be able to take on any kind of role in which he is required to act in any kind of secrecy.
And making matters worse, his body keeps finding new and exciting ways of betraying him. He's stayed really shrimpy, his skin is too dark, he isn't shaped right, he doesn't heal right, he's growing hair where he shouldn't. And now, years later than he should, he's got horns growing out of his skull. Eir, Frigga, and Odin all expected this when he was much younger, and Frigga even used the fact that Loki's horns had not cut to keep him from being forced to take his rite. Even several years before that, Eir asked him about headaches, and told him to see her immediately if he started getting them. This instruction was given so long ago, Loki forgot he had ever received it. And if it wasn't bad enough that people think he's an impostor, now he's got horns. Great. Fantastic. Just what he wanted.
A long time ago, I read a story about frost giants having horns, but being disbudded at a young age because they were hunted by the Æsir for their horns. And I remember thinking, wow. That's hilariously fucked up and cruel. And I kinda wanted more of that. I like the idea of frost giants having horns, because fire giants are always drawn with them, and I like the symmetry. I'm pretty sure there have been a few runs or one-shots where frost giants had horns(?), and those gross Doom clones all had horns, so that's the direction I wanted to go with Loki. Fire giants having horns is also the aspect that made me want to incorporate Hellboy in the first place. Like I said before, I think we all know what's going on with Surtur there. I don't think Loki has the mental fortitude to piece that together, but he'll get there eventually. By force, if need be.
